When Bob Appleyard died in 2015 I wrote a tribute to him. I'll quote most of it below, but the reason for this post is that I have found a clip of him bowling. I can't embed it here, so hurry over to YouTube.
If I'm right, Appleyard is the bowler staring his run up at 0:20 and 1:37. You can also see the England bowlers Freddie Trueman and Johnny Wardle, who is the left-arm spinner. The tall bowler hitching his trousers is Philip Hodgson, who played only a few games for Yorkshire.
I believe it is from Sussex vs Yorkshire at Hove in August 1954, when the Southern county were made to follow on but played out time for the draw in what must have been a rain affected game.
If you want to learn more about Appleyard, I recommend an episode of the Oborne & Heller on Cricket podcast. Stephen Chalke talks about his experience of interviewing cricketers from an earliest generation, including Ken Taylor, Fred Rumsey and Appleyard.
And he also gave a long interview to Christopher Martin- Jenkins, which I have put at the top of this post.
Anyway, this is what I wrote nine years ago:
Appleyard's story is simply extraordinary. His development was held up by the Second World War, with the result that he did not make his debut for Yorkshire until he was 26, playing a few games at the end of the 1950 season.
The following summer, in his first full season in county cricket, Appleyard took 200 wickets for Yorkshire at 14.14 apiece.
But his health was already failing. The next summer he played only one game before being diagnosed with tuberculosis. He had an operation was not expected to live.
By 1954 he was fit enough to play county cricket again, and he took 154 wickets at 14.42, He made his England debut against Pakistan that summer, taking 5-51 in the first innings he bowled in.
His form won him a place on Len Hutton's historic tour to Australia in 1954-5. The Ashes were regained largely because of Tyson and Statham's fast bowling, but it was Appleyard, the stock bowler at the other end, who topped the England bowling averages.
After that his career began to decline. He played his last test in 1956, as he was displaced by the rise of Jim Laker, and injury meant that he was released by Yorkshire after the 1958 season.
In 152 matches for Yorkshire he had taken 708 wickets at 15.44 apiece, and in his nine tests he had 31 victims at 17.87.
Beyond the figures, Appleyard was a remarkable bowler in that he was able to bowl fast medium and off spin off the same run and apparently with the same action.
Appleyard's Telegraph obituary, to which I am indebted for the statistics in this post describes him as "one of the greatest bowlers of the post-war period".
But it continues:
There were judges in Yorkshire who were inclined to go further. The former England fast bowler Bill Bowes, for example, held that Appleyard achieved a level of excellence matched by only two other bowlers – Sydney Barnes and Bill O’Reilly – in the history of the game.
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